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BLOODY RECORD BOASTED

A graphic sketch of the origin, the universal scope, and the crushing effect of the early imperial laws, supplemented and expanded by those of medieval and more modern times, is given by CE., related with all the sinister and cynical insolence, sophistry and hypocrisy of intolerant bigotry. To its Christ it imputes the horrid justification of the sword and the infernal principles of butchery whereby the Church Murderess has “made a hell of earth to merit heaven.” This recital is not alone of ancient sacred history; CE. admits: “These primitive views on heresy have been faithfully transmitted and acted on by the Church in subsequent ages; there is no break in the tradition from St. Peter to Pius X.” (vii, 259.) The principles are yet alive and cherished, their practical application has only for the time being “fallen into abeyance,” only, for the reason that in these modern times “the power to apply more severe measures is wanting.” he admitted ecclesiastical record of repression and murder in its forged and fraudulent faith:

Constantine had taken upon himself the office of lay bishop (episcopus externus) and put the secular arm at the service of the Church, the laws against heretics became more and more rigorous. Under the purely ecclesiastical discipline no temporal punishment could be inflicted on the obstinate heretic, except the damage which might arise to his personal dignity through being deprived of all intercourse with his former brethren. But under the Christian emperors rigorous measures were enforced against the goods and persons of heretics. From the time of Constantine to Theodosius and Valentinian III (313-424) various penal laws were enacted against heretics as being guilty of crime against the State. In both the Theodosian and Justinian codes they were styled infamous persons; all intercourse was forbidden to be held with them; they were deprived of all offices of profit and dignity in the civil administration, while all burdensome offices, both of the camp and of the curia, were imposed upon them; they were disqualified from disposing of their own estates by will, or of accepting estates bequeathed to them by others; they were denied the right of giving or receiving donations, of contracting, buying, and selling; pecuniary fines were imposed upon them; they were often proscribed and banished, and in many cases scourged before being sent into ²⁴⁷ exile. In some particularly aggravated cases sentence of death was pronounced upon heretics, though seldom executed in the time of the Christian emperors of Rome. Theodosius is said to be the first who pronounced heresy a capital crime; this law was passed in 382 against [several named sects of heretics]. Heretical teachers were forbidden to propagate their doctrines, publicly or privately; to hold public disputations; to ordain bishops, presbyters, or other clergy; to hold religious meetings; to build conventicles or to avail themselves of money bequeathed to them for that purpose. Slaves were allowed to inform against their heretical masters and to purchase their freedom by coming over to the Church. The children of heretical parents were denied their patrimony and inheritance unless they returned to the Catholic Church. The books of heretics were ordered to be burned.

 (Vide Codex Theodosianus, lib. XVI, tit. 5, “De Hereticism”)

“This legislation remained in force and with even greater severity in the Kingdoms formed by the victorious barbarian invaders on the ruins of the Roman Empire in the West. The burning of heretics was first decreed in the eleventh century. The Synod of Verona (1184) imposed on bishops the duty to search out heretics in their dioceses and hand them over to the secular power. Other Synods, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) under Pope Innocent III, repeated and enforced this decree, especially the Synod of Toulouse (1229), which established inquisitors in every parish (one priest and two laymen). Everyone was bound to denounce heretics, the names of the witnesses were kept secret; after 1243, when Innocent III sanctioned the laws of Emperor Frederick, II and of Louis IX against heretics, torture was applied in trials; the guilty persons were delivered up to the civil authorities and actually burnt at the stake.

“Paul III (1542) established, and Sixtus V organized, the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office, a regular court of justice [!] dealing with heresy and heretics. (See Roman Congregations.) The Congregation of the Index, instituted by St. Pius V, has for its province the care of faith and morals in literature; it proceeds against, printed matter very much as the Holy Office proceeds against persons (see Index of Prohibited Books). The present pope, Pius X (1909), has decreed the establishment in every diocese of a board of censors and of a vigilance committee whose functions are to find out and report on writings and persons tainted with the heresy of Modernism (Encycl.‘ Pascendi,' 8 Sept. 1907).—[At another place the pious clerical reason for this flagrant attempt against the mind and its liberty of inquiry is thus with unctuous priestly speciousness stated: “for it is notorious that clever sophistry coated with seductive language may render even gross errors of faith palatable to a guileless and innocent heart”! (CE. xiv, 766).]—The present-day legislation against heresy has lost nothing of its ancient severity; but the penalties on heretics are now only of the spiritual order; all the punishments which require the intervention of the secular arm have fallen into abeyance. ...

“The Church's legislation on heresy and heretics is often reproached with cruelty and intolerance. Intolerant it is; in fact its raison d'etre is intolerance of doctrines subversive of the ²⁴⁸ Faith. Cruelty only comes when the punishment exceeds the requirements of the case. ... It suffices to remark that the inquisitors only pronounced on the guilt of the accused and then handed him over to the secular power to be dealt with according to the laws framed by emperors and kings—[at the instigation of the Church!].

“Toleration came in only when faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to ONLY WHERE POWER TO APPLY MORE SEVERE MEASURES WAS WANTING. ... Christ says:‘ Do not think that I am come to send peace upon earth,: I came not to send peace, but a sword.' The history of heresy verifies this prediction”!

 (CE. vii, 256-262, passim.)

With a shudder of undying loathing for the cruel cynical Hypocrite, we may admire the sweet charity of tender mercy displayed by the Holy Church of the Christ, exampled in the sanctimonious Formula of Judgment whereby its Holy Inquisition handed over the racked and broken errant Child of Faith to the prostituted Secular Arm for the final Act of Murder—the blessed Auto-da-Fe, with a prayer for the hated heretics: “Ut quam clementissime et sine sanguinis effusionem puniretur—should be punished as mildly as possible and without the shedding of blood”! The while Their Holinesses kept a standing Decree of Indulgences from the pangs of Purgatory for all the hoodlum Faithful who would please and glorify God by attending the sacred ceremonials of Burning, and especially to those who would aid God and the priests by fetching fagots for the consecrated fires, and throw water on the wood so that the priest-set flames would be slower in their purifying work and allow the writhing “Obstinate” longer time to make Peace with God and Holy Church by meet Repentance; in which event, the “reconciled” Child of Faith would be dragged from the flames only partly cremated, and returned to prison cell there to agonize out the remainder of his life in rapt contemplation of the beauties and sweetness of the blessed Christian Religion, crooning “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

The foregoing loathsome boasted record of the Church, sinister and infamous as it is, may be complemented by the following cynical and sophistical recital of the mental and moral debauch of ignorance imposed by the Church, concluding with the formal admission that “the theocratic State was called upon [by its prostituted mistress the Church] to avenge with the pyre” defiance of the lying fraudulent pretensions of the Church: ²⁴⁹

”During the Middle Ages the Church guarded the purity and genuineness of her Apostolic doctrine through the institution of the ecclesiastical (and State) Inquisition. ... Following the example of the Apostles, the Church today watches zealously over the purity and integrity of her doctrine, since on this rests her whole system of faith and morals, the whole edifice of Catholic thought, ideals, and life. For this purpose the Church instituted the Index of Prohibited Books, which is intended to deter Catholics from the unauthorized reading of books dangerous to faith or morals, for it is notorious that clever sophistry coated with seductive language may render even gross errors of faith palatable to a guileless and innocent heart. (p. 766.) ... Now, formal heresy was likewise strongly condemned by the Catholic Middle Ages; and so the argument ran: Apostasy and heresy are, as criminal offenses against God, far more serious crimes than high treason, murder, or adultery. ... But, according to Romans xiii, 11, seq., the secular authorities have the right to punish, especially grave crimes, with death; consequently, heretics may be not only excommunicated, but also justly (juste) put to death' (St. Thomas, II-II, Q; xi, a, 3). ... The earliest example of the execution of a heretic was the beheading of the ring leader of the Priscillianists by the usurper Maximum at Trier (385). Even St. Augustine, towards the end of his life, favored State reprisals against the Donatists. ... Influenced by the Roman code, which was rescued from oblivion, Frederick II introduced the penalty of burning for heretics by imperial law of 1224. The popes, especially Gregory IX, favored the execution of this imperial law, in which they saw an effective means for the preservation of the Faith. ... Unfortunately, neither the secular nor the ecclesiastical authorities drew the slightest distinction between dangerous and harmless heretics, seeing forthwith in every (formal) heresy a‘ contumelia Creatoris,' which the theocratic State was called upon to avenge with the pyre.”

 (CE. xiv, 766, 768.)

“Hypocrites! Ye compass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves!” Jesus. (Matt. xxiii, 15.)

 But the Church waited not for the secular rulers to obey her murderous behests to “avenge with the pyre” the crime of disbelieving and deriding the Faith, nor did she lose time while watching the execution of her commands of murder by the secular arm. The Church was then itself a secular ruler over vast territories, the stolen “Patrimony of Peter” or States of the Church; and for those territories their Royal-Holinesses set the example of murder and burning of their own heretics. His Holiness Pope Gregory IX (1227-41) was, we are told” “very severe towards heretics, who in those times were universally looked upon as traitors and punished accordingly. ... When in 1224 Frederick II ordered that heretics in Lombard should be burnt at the stake, Gregory IX, then Papal Legate, approved and published the imperial law. In 1231 the Pope enacted a law for Rome that heretics condemned by an ecclesiastical court should be delivered to the secular power to receive their‘ due punishment.' This‘ due punishment' was death by fire for the obstinate and imprisonment for life for the penitent. In pursuance of this law a number were arrested in Rome, burnt at the stake, and imprisoned.” (CE. vi, 797.) And it was in Rome, by law and command of His Royal-Holiness Clement VIII, that the defier of‘ the “Triumphant Beast,” Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in Rome in 1600.

The hypocritical lie is repeated—and in the same breath belied. “ Officially it was not the Church that sentenced unrepenting heretics to death, more particularly to the stake ... Gregory IX ... admitted the opinion, then prevalent among legists, that heresy should be punished with death, seeing that it was confessedly no less serious an offense than high treason. ... [The succeeding popes went from opinions to acts.] In the Bull‘ Ad Extirpanda' (1252) Innocent IV says:‘ When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the podesta or chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.' Moreover, he directs that this Bull and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II [for burning heretics] be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees. ... The passages [of the imperial decrees] which ordered the burning of impenitent heretics were inserted in the papal decretals. ... The aforesaid Bull‘ Ad Extirpanda' remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-92), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake. It is to be noted that excommunication itself was no trifle, for, if the person ²⁵¹ excommunicated did not free himself from excommunication within a year, he was held by the (papal) legislation of that period to be a heretic, and incurred all the penalties that affected heresy.” (CE. viii, 34.)

Here it may be remarked, that prescription or statute of limitations runs not against the murderer. Thus Holy Church, who has murdered and procured the murder of millions, can never escape the just verdict and fatal sentence for her crimes before the bar of Civilization. Impotent now, senile, but venomous still in intention, she reeks yet with the blood of her slain; their ghosts, like Banquo's, will never down. They cry yet to Humanity: Ecrasez l'Infame!

We have just read from CE. the confession that “the theocratic State was called upon to avenge with the pyre” all forms of heresy—or hate for the Church—as a “contumelia Creatoris.” Again it says—again contradicting its false pretense that the State is alone to be “credited” with these pious infamies: “After the Christianized Roman Empire had developed into a theocratic (religious) State, it was compelled—[by whom but by the Church with its terrorizing threats to the superstitious rulers]—to stamp crimes against faith (apostasy, heresy, schism) as offenses against the State. (cf. Cod. Justin., 1, 5, de Haer.: ‘Quod in religionem divinam committitur, in omnium fertur injuriam.') Catholic and citizen of the State became identical terms. Consequently crimes against faith were high treason, and as such were punishable with death.” (CE. xiv, p. 768.) A truer statement of the direful consequences of this enforced prostitution of the “secular arm” of the State to the criminal purposes of the Church in coercing its false and accursed religion upon humanity, cannot be made than this confession, in specious and unctuous words: “The role of heresy in history is that of evil generally. Its roots are in corrupted human nature. It has come over the Church as predicted by her Divine Founder; it has rent asunder the bonds of charity in families, provinces, states, and nations; the sword has been drawn and pyres erected both for its defense and its repression; misery and ruin have followed in its track”! (CE. vii, 261.) The confessed accursed record of Christianity!

The utter dependence of the Church for the beginnings and for the persistence of its bloody dominance, upon the extorted favors and support of the prostituted “Secular Arm” of the State to do its dirty work of subjection, is confessed and illustrated by two instances, one with respect to the overthrow of Paganism, the other accounting for the ultimate suppression of the early heretical sects. Of the former, it is “credited” to the Emperor Gratian: “In the same year, 375, he abolished all the privileges of the pagan pontiffs and the grants for the support of the pagan worship. Deprived of the assistance of the State, paganism rapidly lost influence. ... He made apostasy a crime punishable by the State.” (CE. vi, 729.) With a clerical slur at the “fanciful speculations of the Eastern sects so dear to the Eastern mind,” oblivious of the equally fanciful “Oriental speculations” which are the only source of the holy dogmas of Western Christianism, it is cynically ²⁵²

 [NB: Something omitted from here - RW]

recorded: “but, lacking the support of the temporal power, they sank—[just as “orthodox” Christianity would have sunk to “situm fidei”—holding the sword. (CE. vii, 259.)

As elsewhere suggested, it is pertinent to remark, that history would quickly repeat itself in this highly-to-be-desired respect, with the withdrawal of “the support of the temporal power,” through the immense and illegal support yet given to the Beggar Church through deadhead tax exemption on its thousands of millions of dollars of ill-gotten, idle and hoarded properties.

“St. Augustine seems to have originated the application of the words ‘Compel them to enter in,' to religious persecution. Religious liberty he emphatically cursed: ‘Quid est enim pejor, mors animae quam libertas erroris?—For which is worse, the death of the soul than the liberty of error?' (Epistle clxvi.) Boniface III decreed excommunication of any magistrate who either altered the sentence of the Inquisition, or delayed more than six days in carrying it into execution. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III instituted the Inquisition, and issued the first appeal to princes to employ their power for the suppression of heresy. In 1209, De Montfort (at Innocent's instigation), began the massacre of the Albigenses. In 1215, the Fourth Council of the Lateran enjoined all rulers,‘ as they desired to be esteemed faithful, to swear a public oath that they would labor earnestly, and to the full extent of their power, to exterminate from their dominions all those who were branded as heretics by the Church.' The Council of Avignon, in 1209, enjoined all bishops to call upon the civil power to exterminate heretics. The Bull of Innocent III threatened any prince who failed to extirpate heretics from his realm with excommunication, and with the loss of his realm.”

 (Lecky, History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe, vol. II, chap. iv, passim.)

England was rather distant from Rome and the English spirit did not yield so debasedly as some others did to the orders and dominion of priestcraft; but so early as Alfred the Great, so vaunted by the Church for his piety and learning, we have this picture of prostitution of State to Church; and the effects on both: “In the joint code of laws published by Alfred and Guthrum, apostasy was declared a crime, the payment of Peter's Pence was commanded, and the practice of heathen rites was forbidden. ... But the clergy, ... discharging in each district the functions of local state officials, seem never to have quite regained the religious spirit.” (CE. i, 507.)

Out of scores of instances of legal enactments made by superstitious rulers under the terrors of papal threats, I cite here but one, in the quaint words of a militant philosopher: “Consequent to this claim of the Pope to be the Vicar Generall of ²⁵³ Christ in the present Church is the doctrine of the fourth Counsell of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third (Chap. 3, de Haereticis), That if a King at the Popes admonition, doe not purge his Kingdom of Haeresies, and being excommunicate for the same, doe not give satisfaction within a year, his Subjects are absolved of the bond of their obedience. Where, by Haeresies are understood all opinions which the Church of Rome hath forbidden to be maintained.” (Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt. iv, ch. 44, p. 333; 1651.) The infallible but presumptuous claim of the Vicars of God may be stated in the terms of the famous Bull of the “Two Swords”:

“Under the control of the Church are two swords, that is, two powers. ... Both swords are in the power of the Church, the spiritual and the temporal; the spiritual is wielded in the Church by the hand of the clergy; the secular is to be employed for the Church by the hand of the civil authority, but under the direction of the spiritual power. The one sword must be subordinate to the other; the earthly power must submit to the spiritual authority, as this has precedence of the secular on account of its greatness and sublimity; for the spiritual power has the right to establish and guide the secular power, and also to judge it when it does not act rightly. ... This authority, although granted to man, and exercised by man, is not a human authority, but rather a Divine one granted to Peter by Divine commission and confirmed in him and his successors. Consequently, whoever opposes this power ordained of God opposes the law of God.” (Bull Unam Sanctam, Boniface VIII, Nov. 18, 1302; CE. xv, 126.)

COMPULSORY AND WHOLESALE CONVERSION

 “And the Lord said unto his servant, Go into the highway and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Jesus. (Luke xiv, 28.)

When Charlemagne spent those seven days in Rome with His Holiness, who tricked him into believing that “his imperial dignity was an act of God, made known, of course, through the agency of the Vicar of Christ” (CE. iii, 615), and they together formed those “many great designs for the glory of God and the exaltation of the Church,” due execution of the command of the Christ, “Compel them to come in,” was one of the great designs conspired with His Vicar: “True to his own and his father's understanding with the pope, he invariably insisted on baptism as the sign of submission, punishing with appalling barbarity any resistance, as when, in cold blood, he beheaded in one day 4500 persons at Verdun, in A.D. 782. Under such circumstances it is not wonderful that clerical influence extended so fast. Always bearing in mind his engagement with the papacy, that Roman Christianity should be enforced upon Europe wherever his influence could reach, he remorselessly carried into execution the penalty of death that he had awarded to the crimes of: 1. refusing baptism; 2. false pretense of baptism; 3. relapse to idolatry; 4. the murder of a bishop or priest; 5. human sacrifice; 6. eating meat in Lent. To the pagan German his sword was a grim, but convincing missionary.” (Draper, The Intellectual Development of Europe, i, 374.) This secular authority is confirmed by this clerical admission; that under the Carlovingian Empire, “in war conversion went hand in hand with victory; in peace Charles ruled through bishops. ... The Teutonic Order began the great conflict which after more than half a century of bloodshed dealt the death-blow to paganism in Prussia.” (CE. iii, 700, 705.) Conversion by force and arms continued through the Ages of Faith and brought entire nations to Christ: “More lasting success followed the attempts, patterned on the Crusades, to carry on wars of conversion and conquest in those territories of north-eastern Europe peopled by tribes that had lapsed from the Faith or that were still heathen; among such pagans were the Obotrites, Pomeranians, Wiltzi, Serbs, Letts, Livonians, Finns, and Prussians. The preliminary work was done in the twelfth century by missionaries. They were aided with armed forces [by several kings and rulers]. From the beginning of the thirteenth century Crusades were undertaken against Livonia, Courland, Esthonia, and Prussia. In Lithuania Christianity did not win until 1368.” (CE. v, 612.) In Hungary, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, “the new religion was spread by the sword. ... ²⁵⁵ With these laws King St. Stephen brought over almost all his people to the Catholic Faith. ... He [a later King] took strong measures against those who had fallen away from the Faith.” (CE. vii, 548-9.)

Thus it was that by war and bloody imposition rather than by washing in the Blood of the Lamb, “vast tribes of savages who had always been idolaters, who were perfectly incapable, from their low state of civilization, of forming any but anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, or of concentrating their attention steadily on any visible object, and who for the most part were converted, not by individual persuasion, but by the commands of their chiefs, embraced Christianity in such multitudes that their habits soon became the dominating habits of the Church. From this time the tendency to idolatry was irresistible. The old images were worshipped under new names.” (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 218.) The brand of conversion was marked by the outfit of missionaries and military auxiliaries who first caught the barbarians; and if the wrong kind got them first, it made all the difference in the world in point of whether the result was the intelligent working of the Holy Ghost or sheer ignorance. The, great Bishop “Ulphilas (311-388) taught the Goths the Arian theology; Arian kingdoms arose in Spain, Africa, Italy. The Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Alans, and Lombards received a system which they were as little capable of understanding as they were of defending, and the Catholic bishops, the monks, the sword of Clovis, the action of the papacy, made an end of it before the eighth century.” (CE. i, 707.) Arianism was very simple; it held that there was but a One-Person God, and denied the Blessed Trinity of Three-in-One. Thus Arianism was “an attempt to rationalize the Creed by stripping it of mystery so far as the relation of Christ to God was concerned” (Ib.). But this simple and de-mystified theology, the non-Catholic barbarians were too ignorant to understand; whereas, the other barbarians whose, minds were enlightened by the Holy Ghost at the point of the Catholic sword, were perfectly intelligent to comprehend the Mystery of the Holy Trinity,—which would have stumped Aristotle. The Arians had only to follow the ordinary Multiplication Table—”One times One is One”; whereas the Orthodox. had to multiply curiously,—”Three times One is One!” The true formula is—Three times Naught is Nothing! 

CONVERSION SKIN DEEP

In truth, however, “these nations were only Christianized upon the surface, their conversion being indicated by little more than their making the sign of the cross.” (Draper, Op. cit., i, 365.) True, indeed, it is, as is scores of times confessed: “Paganism had not been renewed in Christ.” (CE. iii, 700.) “Christians who considered themselves faithful, held in a measure to the worship of the sun. Leo the Great in his day says that it was the custom of many Christians to stand on the steps of the Church of St. Peter and pay homage to the Sun by obeisance and prayers.” (CE. iv, 297; cf, iii, 724-727.) And generally was it true: “The pagani retained the worship of the old gods even after they were all Christianized.” (CE. vi, 12.) Among the Germans, and it is exactly as with all others, “the acceptance of the Christian name and ideas was at first a purely mechanical one.” (CE. vi, 485.) ²⁵⁶

 As the result of the superficial veneer, in the early days when persecution occasionally broke out, and offering incense to the statue of Dea Roma or the Emperor was the test of Pagan patriotism, great numbers of laity and even of clergy “flocked at once to the altars of the heathen idols to offer sacrifice.” (CE. ix, 2.) “The apostates and the timid who had bought a certificate of apostasy, became so numerous as to fancy that they could lay down the law to the Church, ... a state of affairs which gave rise to controversies and deplorable troubles. A bishop, followed by his whole community, was to be seen sacrificing to the gods.” (CE. i, 191.) At first the Church “imposed perpetual penance and excommunication without hope of pardon” on the backsliders; “however, the great number of Lapsi and Libellatici ... led to a relaxation of the rigor of ecclesiastical discipline, leaving the forgiveness of the sin to God alone” (CE. i, 624), while their easy return to the decimated fold of Holy Church immensely increased its sacred revenues and extended its sway. However, “when the Roman Empire became Christian, apostates were punished by deprivation of all civil rights. They could not give evidence in a court of law, and could neither bequeath nor inherit property. To induce anyone to apostatize was an offense punishable with death, under the Theodosian Code, XVI, 7, De Apostasis.” (CE. i, 625.)

Thus by centuries of fraud, fear and force was the “house of God” filled from the highways and the hedges, the forests and the wattle villages,, with Pagans “nominally converted to Christianity.” Heathen superstitions veneered with the Pagan superstitions called Christianity, blended together for the further bestialization of the Faithful of Holy Church of the Christ, and the pall of the Dark Ages of Faith settled down over benighted, Church-ruled Christendom,—that “civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity,” and “fully absorbed in the supernatural.” Two holy characteristics of the Age of Faith, the grovelling fear of guilt and devout concern for the devil, are thus commended: “Superstition is abject and crouching, it is full of thoughts of guilt; it distrusts God and dreads the power of evil” (CE. i, 555); and, with the pious Christians, “as among all savages, disease and death were commonly ascribed to evil spirits or witchcraft.” (CE. xiv, 26.) So through the Ages of Faith!

Holy Church and Divine Christianity being now in full power and possession over mind and body of Christendom, it had free scope to bring forth fruits unto perfection of “Christian Civilization.” 

THE “FRUITS” OF CHRISTIANITY

“Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them.” Jesus.

 The first effects of a new, and particularly an official State Religion, are upon mind and morals,—the state of culture or prevailing civilizing conditions; essentially, on the system of moral and intellectual education of the peoples subject to it. This is recognized by the Church: “ As in many other respects, so for the work of education, the advent of Christianity is the most important epoch in the history of mankind.” (CE. v, 299.) Alas, this is ²⁵⁷ disastrously true, as the Church's own history demonstrates. Jesus Christ, says CE., was the “Perfect Teacher”; “to His Apostles He gave the command,‘ Going, therefore, teach ye all nations.' These words are the charter of the Christian Church as a teaching institution” (ib.). Here it got its Divine License to teach, and it taught. How effective was the Church as the Divinely instituted Pedagogue of Christendom, can be justly appreciated only through a knowledge of what kind of education, moral and mental, previously and at the time existed, and what educational system the Church inherited from the “heathens” when it assumed its sacred monopoly of teaching, and by a comparison between the pre-christian and the Christian systems and results. By what the Church destroyed of existing systems, and by what is produced through its own,—by these fruits of its zeal for Christian teaching must the success of its execution of its Divine Commission be known and judged.

Christianity arose and finally prevailed in the Graeco-Roman world, and there is exercised its Divine License as exclusive teacher of faith and morals and of secular education. Before the advent of Christianity, the nations of the Pagan Empire were—we are told—”such as sit in darkness and the shadow of death”; the “Perfect Teacher” came “to give light to them that sat in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke, i, 79; cf. Matt. iv, 16). A dismal picture is thus presented, and for centuries was touched up with the darkest colors by Christian preachments, of the moral depravity if not intellectual benightedness of the poor heathens before the “Light of the World” was shed upon them from the Cross on Calvary. The Greeks and Romans knew naught of Moses and the Prophets, had never conned the Ten Commandments, and had never murdered any one “who hearkeneth not unto the priest,” as commanded in Deut. xvii, 12. Deplorable indeed must have been their state before the Divine Teacher undertook their enlightenment. The picture of their actual moral and intellectual plight we will scan as drawn by Christian scholars. Here is faintly a sketch of— 

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